RESIST - A very short film

Hi, Im Pelle from Sweden!

First of all I want to introduce myself and it feels like the best way to do that is to take a quick look at my demoreel, but in summary I'm a soon to graduated VFX-artist focusing on Lighting, FX and compositing. 

Below is my entry for The Rookies, my examination project from Visual Magic.

A (very) short film about an alien robot invasion and the beginning of the fight back. It's 90% CGI except for one shot composited with a plate. I created this on my own during the span of six weeks.

The choice of art direction and story is tied to my admittance project to Visual Magic, where I created a similar short film but from the other perspective, a human landing on an alien planet and encountering massive robots, linked below. 

I thought it would be a fun concept to help compare how far I've come since I started my studies.

My goals for the "RESIST" project

▸ To combine and create different FX in an actual production
▸ Challenge myself in large scene management
▸ Produce something truly eye-catching
▸ Practice and have fun with animation

Storyboard

This is the story and progression of my short. I took great inspiration from the incredible "Blindsight" short film directed by Danil Krivoruchko and a commercial for Honda created by Time Based Arts. As is evident I tried to follow these references very closely to push myself to inch closer to these incredible artists works.

Assets

The hero car I got from Mateusz Wolinski on sketchfab, the robot from JohnMesplay on sketchfab as well. I retextured, cleaned, rigged and heavily modified the models to fit my needs and art direction. The city is from Kitbash3D.

Animation

A big part of any CG short. It's incredibly important to get this right and making things feel natural, weighty and convincing. I spent a lot of time here, tweaking and iterating with feedback from friends and classmates to get it to a good place. I've been looking at A LOT of references for car movement and it helped a ton.

FX ☻

My favorite part! Most of the FX is done in Houdini, and my god this program is wonderful to work with. Right now I have gathered enough experience working with Houdinis different systems that combining 10 different FX in the final shot was a fun and rewarding experience.

Compositing

For the first shot in outer space i opted to use a plate from NASA instead of creating earths surface in 3D. This was mainly to save a lot of time. I have already in the past (see admittance to Visual Magic video) done planets and know how taxing they are on hardware and time so it felt like a smart move. The falling comets are created and rendered from Houdini and the plate projected on a mesh to get parallax from the camera move.

Due to working in ACES it was overall a pleasant and flexible environment to do comp in. And all the shots in the short got a lot of love in nuke.

Thank you for your attention!

I've poured a lot of love and hours (about 400) into this project and I hope you find it interesting and worthy of consideration. All the best from Sweden!